I’ll be very interested to see how his career turns out. This article about racing stride research was very interesting, and I’m curious to see if they will be right about The Green Monkey…Sounds like he could end up being a disappointment. I’ve put the race horse excerpt below.
http://www.horseusa.com/horsehealth/…=63533&subsec=
From the Thoroughbred Times online, May 1, 2006-
Elite Thoroughbreds
Analysis of the extreme racing gait of an elite Thoroughbred is perhaps the area where the information provided by high-speed kinetics most seems to throw open a door to the previously unseen and unknown.
Jeff Seder of EQB Agents and Consultants in West Grove, Pennsylvania, began with a business and filmmaking background. He applied what he knew to getting good film of racehorses. He also began collecting data on elite equine athletes by attending Thoroughbred sales.
“Prior databases [mostly academic] included average athletes, and the information did not exist to describe the elite horse,” Seder said. “So we became obsessive-compulsive about getting good data.” Experts like Clayton agree.
“Mr. Seder has amassed a wealth of data and has been generous in providing that information for study,” she said. Seder has published much of his data in a series of articles that evaluates the various detailed phases of gait in racing Thoroughbreds. Perhaps more controversially, he also wrote an article that relates racing performance to foreleg flight patterns among 900 unraced two-year-olds offered at major sales in the United States. Seder listed a group of 73 horses with “good” motion and a group of 77 horses with “bad” motion. The latter group showed extraneous foreleg motion, including hyper-rotation of the cannon bone (hoof hitting an elbow in extreme cases); winging, paddling, or wobbling; and other deviations from straight and correct motion.
“Good” movers were patterned more closely after the ideal. All horses compared were matched to have workouts of similar velocity.
The subsequent North American racing performances of these two groups were evaluated. Seder concluded what proponents of high-speed gait analysis had hoped for when the technology first began to be used. He wrote: “Extraneous foreleg motion was shown to be related to subsequent racing earnings and the level of competition attained. Horses with good foreleg motion (as defined and determined with high-speed film evaluation) earned more and had greater stakes-level success (83% higher earnings) than horses with bad foreleg motion.”
Seder’s data also has yielded information about high-leg-action horses and turf racing, about the lack of performance predictability when trying to use only velocity and length- of-stride measurements, and several other very technical facts about the vast differences and arrays of phases contained within the racing gait of the horse.
Seder pointed out that The Green Monkey, a Forestry colt recently purchased for $16-million at the Fasig-Tipton Calder sale of selected two-year-olds in training, had a fabulous 9.8-second workout, but high-speed film revealed that the entire work was done at a rotary gallop, a very quick gait that can produce fast times but costs more energy. In Seder’s opinion, such a gait is unlikely to be maintained for longer distances. High-speed analysis of that horse’s motion leaves questions in Seder’s mind and puts tremendous, maybe excessive, expectations on the horse. “Really good horses have a number of ways to run fast,” Seder said. “And if they are ‘correct’ in their motion, they will be able to generate more power and speed without tiring out or breaking down.”
Seder did not set out to ruin the careers of those horses that were deemed to have bad motion in his study, and in a bit of kill-the-messenger mentality, he said he has sometimes not been well received within the racing industry.
“Roughly 80% of horses bred for the track will have some sort of problem and never make it to an elite status,” Seder said. “The history of science is that innovation is met with skepticism. I’m just taking science and playing probabilities, looking for those horses that, based on our data of gait and motion analysis, have a higher chance of making it.”
Whether you use the latest in cameras, high-speed analysis, and data evaluation, or you hang near the rail to find a way of going that pleases your eye, everyone is looking for the same thing–a horse that has a good chance to make it.
So you just never know.
